Pixel Plow is the Official Render Farm of Planetside Software

September 23, 2016

Pixel Plow is the Official Render Farm of Planetside Software

Planetside Software is excited to be partnered with Pixel Plow as our Official Render Farm. Pixel Plow is a relative newcomer to the render farm business but they bring critical IT-industry experience to the table resulting in increased efficiency and allowing them to dramatically reduce operating costs. As a result they’re able to offer the lowest prices and most advanced platform available in the render farm industry.

Pixel Plow has a history of customer-friendly improvements to their service. The last time they found a way to save money, they didn’t pocket the change, they passed the savings on to their customers. Time is still money, as they say, but you may be surprised by how little it can cost to get renders done for you at high speed on Pixel Plow’s platform. Maybe we’ll ruin the surprise a little though…

We decided to do an experiment to find out what the lowest render farm pricing means in the real world. We took one of the Terragen 3 example scenes, “Planet with Asteroid Rings” and added a little camera move to animate it. Then we rendered it at 1080p on Pixel Plow. Typical render time for a single frame was about 16 minutes on our test machine here, so it would have taken 1600 minutes, or nearly 27 hours, to complete it. We submitted the project at low priority for maximum savings and got the first frame back a mere 7 minutes later. 8 more followed within 60 seconds. They continued to flow in at a steady pace and we received all 100 frames in about an hour. Quite a time savings for us, but how much did it cost?

$2.92 USD

Less than a latte at Starbucks? That’s pretty awesome. We figured at that rate we might as well do some more! So we put together another shot of 300 frames this time and submitted it again but at High priority – 5 times the cost – just to see how high it would go. It came back to us in about an hour and a half, much less than than 3x the render time due to High priority, and even though it was at a greater cost per Ghz, the total was still very reasonable for 10 seconds of 1080p animation: $54.06.

Here’s the finished animation of 400 frames, rendered on Pixel Plow for less than $60. Had we rendered it all at low priority the cost would have been a very reasonable $14.

The conclusion: rendering animations is finally affordable for everyone, thanks to Pixel Plow!

All this praise may sound a little over-the-top, we’ll admit. But our enthusiasm is genuine. The reality is we’re innovators ourselves, working to tackle big problems in new ways, so we can’t help but appreciate anyone doing things a little differently and excelling as a result. We’re proud to be working with Pixel Plow to bring rendering to the masses.

So what are you waiting for? Get rendering, let’s see your best scene put into motion!